I guess it's too much to ask that anybody - anybody - in Washington base activity on principle

The Stafford student loan program - designed for the middle class, as opposed to Pell grants, which are for poor people - had been doling out its loans at a supposedly temporarily lowered rate for a few years.  Well, that rate is set, per the legislation that lowered it, to rise to what it had been.  Of course, the MEC and FHers generally want to extend the lower rate.  But what the hell are John Boehner and Mitt Romney doing going along with this?

Here's why we here at LITD don't make any big defense of the Republican party per se

They are all too often the stupid party, that's why.  Even the smart wings that emerge within it from time to time, such as the Young Guns, can do incredibly goofy stuff like tell conservative voters that Lugar is a better choice than Mourdock. Hello?  Do they really want to plant their flag in from of the stinkin' Department of Education?

He really has dropped all concern for whether we see how sinister he truly is - today's edition

The Most Equal Comrade quietly overrode last September's congressional ban on aid to the Palestinian Authority.  They're getting $192 billion of your tax dollars. This, in the face of the reuniting of Fatah and Hamas.

Granted, the guy has only ever had a peripheral acquaintance with Western civilization, but the utter contempt he has for it was clearly and deliberately inculcated in him from an early age.

Whether it was constitutional wasn't even remotely on her mind

Representative Trey Gowdy grills Kathleen "religious-institutions-have-to-fund-extermination-of-embryonic-and-fetal-Americans" Sibelius on what Supreme Court precedents have to say about First Amendment non-interference in religious conviction.

These people are thugs

Kim Strassel at the WSJ on the MEC's enemies list.  Romney donors being named individually and made to sound unsavory just because, in some cases, such as foreclosing on homes or running energy companies, they're doing their jobs, and in some cases because they are on record as holding pro-normalcy positions like keeping the definition of marriage what it has always been.

This regime is going to get so nasty and ruthless between now and November, we must be surprised at nothing. 

How reality-driven normal people respond to conversational overtures from the hopelessly disconnected

Ohio Governor John Kasich can't hold back a bemused snort in response to a reporter's question based on the premise that, now that the state's horrific deficit situation has been dealt with, it's time to reopen the spending spigot and aim it at the socially underserved.  Or whatever they're calling themselves these days.

The latest area into which the totalitarian MEC regime is reaching

The family farm.  The regime is working to impose child-labor regs on them.  The overlords want the cattle to be indistiguishable from the people.

And I've seriously been taken to task for calling them Freedom-Haters

An EPA official likens what he thinks his agency should do to normal-people energy producers to the way Roman military units subdued Mediterranean communities during the empire days.

It's on purpose, people, and there's nothing sensationalistic about saying so.

It's on purpose - today's edition

Durable goods orders down to worst level in three years.  Inventories increasing.

The FHer regime reads numbers like this and sees multitudes of Americans on their knees, resigning themselves to government dependency.

Slacking off on border security is never a good idea

Mark Krikorian at NRO looks at the numbers for recent illegal immigration trends and concludes that, to the extent that they show a decline, it's because we steppped up enforcement. Plus, as he points out, there are millions of folks from other countries besides Mexico who would like to sneak in here.

When a civilization loses its will to survive

Meet Cathereine Ashton, the head negotiator for the P5+1 team that is trying yet another round of pattty-cake with Iran over its nuclear program.  Her background is alarmingly, sordidly anti-West.

Still basing policy on a thoroughly debunked fraud - and using your tax dollars to implement it

The MEC regime is funding a Global Climate Initiative that will conduct "green" programs in Africa and South America.  Never mind the real loooming catastrophe of US debt.

FHers are every bit as deranged as the Kim regime or the jihadists.  You wouldn't pursue this course if you were in touch with basic reality.

Sure motivates you to send 'em food and fuel aid

North Korean state television interrupted its normal programming to announce this little tidbit.  "Very soon."  "Steps/" "Targets."  "Ashes." That Kim family, those folks aren't wrapped too tight. 

Rapid progress by a society of imperfect people

I've been thinking about Michael Barone's latest column since I came across it earlier this morning.  He makes a supremely noteworthy point, which is that, for all the nostalgia one hears about the days when an 18-year-old could get an assembly-line job at a good wage, with benefits such as health insurance and retirement money, the fact is that most people hated those jobs.  They slogged away for decades in a scramble for security.  And Barone knows whereof he speaks.  He's a native Detroiter.

In the course of crafting his argument (that the world of work no longer looks anything like that), he mentions Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management.  I looked up his bio and refreshed myself on what he was about.  His careerpath was a bit odd for a guy from a well-to-do Quaker family whose mother was a leading abolitionist.  But instead of reading law at Harvard, he went to work in a machine shop and became a mechanical engineer and the first real industrial consultant.

There's no way to deny the strain of contempt and cynicism that runs through Taylor's worldview.  He once testified to a congressional committee that anyone who would make a lifelong occupation out of shop-floor work was too stupid (his word) to grasp the big picture behind the tasks he performed, the role his efforts played in a larger scheme.

So Taylor did no favors to the effort to make labor and management feel like they were on the same team.  He saw two entities: brains and mules.

Lest the argument be put forth here that such is exactly the justification behind the union movement, it must also be affirmed that thousands upon thousands of Americans did indeed sign up for jobs of mind-numbing tedium of their own volition.  The production schedulers at General Widgets are not responsible for the worldviews of applicants who come seeking employment.

A true all-on-the-same-team management approach did not get underway until the Six Sigma push, with its teams of black belts and green belts and improvement projects, got going at Motorola in the 1980s.  Just in time for the twilight years of America's manufacturing focus.

Retrospect can tell us a few things.  Industrial theory would have benefitted from taking a more hopeful view of the stock of people entering the shop-floor ranks.  That would have required a different kind of educational system, however.  As we know, John Dewey thought American education should cultivate just enough human refinement to make the masses suitable for, well, mass production.

The big-picture arc of how humans - particularly in the United States - organize themselves to get things done does indeed show a trend toward greater choice, greater affirmation of individual sovereignty and emphasis on the fact that one's choices are really one's own.

And that's how it needs to be, since the shop floor is not where many of us are headed anymore.

We offer patty cake; they reciprocate with contempt

Remember that downed drone?  You know, the one for which the Pentagon drew up three - count 'em - three plans for getting back from Iran, and then for which the MEC issued a tepid "pretty-please-give-it-back"?  Well, the Iranian regime is building an exact replica - not a scale model, but a replica replete with all the technology.

The wacky lens through which FHers view reality

David Axelrod on the Sunday talking-head circuit saying that pro-freedom Pubs are waging a "reign of terror" in Congress against Reasonable Gentlemen.

FHers don't know what to make of a Pub who doesn't just hand them his vital parts on a platter saying, "Lunch is on me, respected colleague."

Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome seems to be a public health problem in Utah

Now you have the state attorney general calling 4th district House candidate Mia Love a "novelty."

The kind of succinct yet comprehensive statement about our current juncture that needs wide, wide dissemination

Great video called "If I Wanted America to Fail."

Let's go ahead and make it real easy for you to see it (but HT to Bookworm Room for being the first place I saw it today):

Another Reasonable Gentleman must face a primary challenger

Orrin Hatch in Utah.  He, like anyone afflicted with Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome, can point to a few things he's gotten right over the years, but now it's time for him to answer for his yay votes on Medicare Part D, Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac bailouts, the SCHIP program, raising the debt ceiling sixteen times, and establishing the Department of Education.

Real conservatism is thriving on the state level.  So how did we once again get saddled by a candidate for prez in the advanced stage of RGS (and who is endorsing Hatch in the Utah Senate race)?

Look, pal, you're our standard bearer now, so knock it off with the "he's a nice guy" s---

Sheesh, do we have to start breathing down Mitt Romney's neck right out of the gate?  I've heard justifications for this Reasonable Gentleman's coronation along the line of his temprament being different from McCain's.  I'm sorry, but "He's a nice guy" is the same sort of sympton of advanced-stage Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome as "Let us remember they are not our enemies." 

Michelle Malkin once again shows she is one of our side's most formidable weapons by jumping right on this one.

UPDATE: She has expanded her remarks into an entire - and important and forceful - column.

You gotta give 'em points for cleverness

Some organs of Muslim thought published by Muslims living in Western societies are exploring the argument that since those societies are loosening up the millenia-old definition of marriage to include same-gender unions, why not loosen up restrictions on number as well, therby bestowing approval on the thousands of polygynous families living right under those Western governments' noses.

The real scandal

Ralph Peters says it's not the soldiers who posed with the remains of the jihadists, but rather the LA Times, which published the photos. He also takes to task the Pentagon brass who seem to have fallen for that technocratic, bureaucratic kow-towing to political correctness which has infected most large organizations now, from corporations to universities. The erosion of our resolve to survive as a sovereign nation based on the idea that human beings ought to be free is a chilling thing to watch.

When a continent's decline morphs into rot . . .

. . . you get phenomena like the return of Jew-hatred on a mass scale.

If there's one thing the Most Equal Comrade can't stand, it's a successful American

He says he'll veto the House's 20 percent tax cut for all US businesses with 499 or fewer employees. Says, without any substantiation, that the extra 20 percent of money not seized at gunpoint by the entity in our society with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force would wind up in the hands of - you guessed it, the rich.

What happens when the head of the Senate budget committtee at least flirts with the notion of putting together a federal budget

Harry Reid shuts him down.

So, for the fourth year in a row, we're flying by the seat of our pants as Congress shirks its primary duty.

Impressive heavy artillery

Nice to see the Republican party, which, while it staggers in the throes of confusion at least as often as it operates with clarity and courage, is still the only political hope this nation has for avoiding catastrophe, trotting out some bared-fangs television spots.

Once again, looking for the source of the problem everywhere but himself

The MEC's speech today about oil speculators and the need for a redundant regulatory body is vintage MEC.

There's bad in a general sense, and then there is the kind of bad that is unique to this particular time

I haven't written about either the GSA confab in Las Vegas or the Secret Service prostitute-hiring scandal in Cartegena, Colombia yet.

Here at LITD, we reserve for first-tier consideration those developments that illustrate clearly the consequences to society of tilting leftward. The fact of the matter is that either of these incidents, while they are indeed harmful to the MEC regime (which is, admittedly, always a good thing), do not get to the essence of what makes leftist policy so harmful. Yes, they both - certainly, the GSA scandal - illustrate how the government gravy train can fill a public servant's head with notions of power and moral immunity. Really, though, that just illustrates how government bloat has gotten out of hand in our time. Let's be honest; either of these situations could have happened in a Republican administration. They would have been less likely to occur, I would sumbit, but it wouldn't have been impossible.

I guess another way of putting it is that we definitely do need to protect the president, and, given the sprawl of present-day government, we probably do need an agency that provides logistical and support infrastructure to the rest of the federal leviathan. But we don't need stimulus spending, green-energy subsidization, federally subsidized before-and-after-school meals or day care, and the rest of the unconsitutional intrusions about which LITD opines daily.

It is true that we need less of even the things we may need some of, and that's what went wrong in Cartagena and Las Vegas.

Next on my must-read list (after I finish the five books I'm plowing through now)

Been reading the reviews of Katie Pavlich's Fast and Furious: Barack Obama's Bloodiest Scandal and the Shameless Cover-Up. Since MSM coverage of this scandal has been scant, I've been waiting for a thoroughly documented, comprehensive account of what it was (is), which this book appears to be.

This regime will be the end of Western civilization if it's not stopped.

Glad to see this one gettng addressed promptly

Robert VerBruggen at NRO's The Corner fires back at Salon's Alex Pareene's piece not just implying that National Review harbors racists, but making an explicit accusation.

LITD will check in at NRO throughout the day to see if other refutations appear.

The effete former Gawker and Wonkette Decency-Hater undermines his own legitimacy in this particular piece by quite consciously using the adjective "moderate" to characterize the Most Equal Comrade. Always a deal-clinching sign that a writer is from Planet FH-er.

It would make a good parlor game to see how you could expand this list to thirty

John Hawkins lists the seven most disturbing moments so far in the Most Equal Comrade's rule.

There never has been a movement by this name

Jonah Goldberg debunks the notion that Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner, any of the Gilded Age industrialists, or anybody else involved with economic freedom, ever called themselves "social Darwinists."

That cornered-animal-with-the-bared-fangs schtick has worked for decades

Jennifer Lind at Foreign Affairs examines the three-pronged reason why North Korea continues to get away with its belligerence:

1.) We're nuts and unpredictable

2.) We're in horrible shape economically, and if we're nudged into collapse, it will be a humanitarian crisis for several countries.

3.) We have a nuclear arsenal.

She recounts the sequence of criminal behavior NK has engaged in over the last forty-plus years. Her article is a useful follow-up to the classic Joshua Muravchik article in Commentary a few years back entitled "Facing Up to North Korea." The whole story, while a tale of how the world became a more dangerous place, does provide us with instructive insights into how we might - if we have the clarity and the will - prevent it from becoming even more precariously close to apocalypse.

Class can still be found in this post-modern world

Peyton Manning calls various Indianapolis reporters to thank them for the way they covered what had been his team for fourteen years.

The dinosaur media wasn't going to fill you in on this part

Hillary Rosen, of "Ann-Romney-has-never-worked-a-day-in-her-life" sudden fame, is half of a well-connected and politically strident lesbian couple. The other half is a teacher's union activist.

What I want to weigh in on is Rosen's subsequent attempt at walking back her original outburst. I mean the business about the hypothetical diner waitress in small-town Nevada with two kids and a dependence on government-funded daycare.

She couches what she says about that in terms that assume anyone would think a cut in such funding would of course be bad.

She's not that stupid, is she? Nowhere near everybody thinks that. I certainly don't. What the hell is the federal government doing funding daycare anywhere, to any extent?

The things Freedom-Haters assume other people's assumptions to be.

It's on purpose - today's edition

This regime is now on record as having stated that this is its goal, so now it has to live with it. When it was pointed out to White House aide Jason Furman that the Buffett rule would not make a dent worth talking about in the federal deficit, he acknowledged that that wasn't the purpose in the proposed implememntation. It was about making the tax code more "fair."

How much more plain can this bunch make its collectivist aims?

The Most Equal Comrade and everyone he has enlisted to serve in his regime really do think that individual achievement is morally suspect. Not only that, since the Buffet rule is really just a way to double the capital gains tax, this regime plainly views belief in the dreams of others to accomplish and contribute great things, as expressed by investment in those dreams, to be just as morally suspect. Wealth creation, capital formation, money naturally flowing to its most productive uses - they despise these bedrock principles of societal health.

So the task before us - in the short period of six-plus months, and with far from the most effective spokesperson for the stakes involved as the public face of our stance - is to swell the ranks of those who understand how freedom and prosperity are cultivated. Unlike economics, politics is a zero-sum game. We will get newcomers to our cause from the ranks of those who may be considering the other view, the view that there is something wrong with keeping one's own money, and something wrong with succeeding at the aims one has crafted for one's own life.

Freedom and fairness are both essential conditions for human well-being, but only one of those conditions can occupy the top spot. Freedom is more important than fairness. For one thing, it's easier to define. Witness the Most Equal Comrade's facile distortion of the latter term.

Before the MEC goes invoking Dutch . . .

. . .he ought to bone up on what the great man actually had to say about the relationship between the government and the individual, and the importance of individual citizens getting to keep a maximum of what they earn, and the importance of normal-people sources of energy.

We'd rather hear the terms "markets" and "economic freedom"

Jonah Goldberg at NRO today offers the apparent Pub prez candidate a salient cautionary note. Goldberg notes Romney's tendency to talk in terms of Washington needing to be "friendly to business." Mitt may mean well; he may be talking about small-scale entrepreneurs as well as the starched-shirt bureaucrats who oversee unwieldy behemoths whose stock shares are publicly traded in the canyons of lower Manhattan. He would not run the risk of it coming off that way if he stuck with rhetoric centered on freedom. As Goldberg points out, Americans are increasingly wary of anything that smacks of industrial policy or glistening wing tips passing through a revolving door between Washington and points north on the eastern seaboard. Certainly conservatives have had quite enough of central planning, corporate appeasement of leftist schemes, and wonky, technocratic approaches to economic issues.

It doesn't seem like Mitt's natural inclination to get this, but now is the time to start trying to reach him on it.

Well, then . . .

With the withdrawal of Rick Santorum - to whose campaign I gave money three times - from the race for GOP presidential nominee, it's obvious that Mitt Romney is the party's candidate.

LITD is on record in several posts as being quite uncomfortable with a Romney Candidacy. To reiterate the most egregious sources of that discomfort:

1.) McCain-style Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome, as in "He's not a bad guy; he's just in over his head." No, Governor, the Most Equal Comrade is a very bad guy who holds the country over which he presides in utter disdain.

2.) Automatic increases in the minimum wage. We should not even have a minimum wage, let alone any kind of increase.

3.) His statement that he believes the global climate is getting warmer and that human activity is a cause.

4.) His flip-flops on abortion.

5.) His multiple statements earlier in his political career that attempt to put a chasm between himself and Reaganite conservatism.

So, as the WSJ's Daniel Henninger says, he will have to be "nudged to the right." We'll have to breathe down his neck, raise holy hell at any sign that he doesn't get it.


But now it's time to close ranks and order the bumper stickers and yard signs. He's not the preferred general, but we didn't ask for this war. It was thrust upon us by those who harbor a visceral hatred of basic human freedom. There must be no reservation in the way we fight.

So, Governor, if you have an A game, let's see it. The fate of Western civilization is now on your shoulders.

Barack Obama, known here at LITD as The Most Equal Comrade, hates basic human freedom and holds the country he presides over in utter disdain - today's edition

This business of moving a half-billion dollars out of the Health and Human Services section of the federal budget over to the IRS so as to ensure that Freedom-Hater-care survives whatever the Supreme Court does shows what a foul, stinking, spiritually rotten being he is.

Brilliant

James O'Keefe is waging this conflict with the Left the way it ought to be waged - with big, heretofore seemingly invincible targets, with humor, wit and a dose of courage.

This time it's a sting to expose the real agenda behind the push to abolish voter ID requirements.

O'Keefe ties to be a man of conscience about it, saying he'd feel better showing the polling guy his photo ID, and the guy basically says, "It's up to you, pal. I'm certainly not going to hassle you for it."

And the "Eric Holder" angle, and the Fast and Furious reference; is the polling guy ignorant, or playing ignorant? Inquiring minds want to know. In any event, he's not too worked up over it.

It's stuff like this . . .

. . . that gives me the mega-jitters about Mitt being the one to go up against the MEC and be the figurehead of the Pubs. Sometimes the odor of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome wafts off the guy so strongly, the whole atmosphere smells like 2008.

Just dandy - today's edition

The point of conversations about North Korea lately has been the upcoming rocket launch and whether the West will shoot it down. Now it looks like NK is gearing up for another nuclear test.

Willing to bring the United States of America to ruin just because not a one of them wants to appear uncool to his or her peers

Great Barry Rubin essay at P J Media on the mentality of virtuous-intentions chic.

Yet more evidence that the MEC has it in for Israel

"Keep up the good work."

Where we are - today's edition

I've said it before and I'll preface this post by repeating it: I'm not a fan of the Lee Greenwood song "God Bless the USA." As patriotic songs go, it's leaden. It's rhythmically plodding, the melody is unimaginative, the words try too hard to go for the populist vibe, and Lee Greenwood's voice does nothing for me.

But lots of people like it, there's nothing offensive about it, and its basic sentiment is one I'm full aligned with.

A school in Massachussetts liked it, and wanted to sing it at an event. The school's chicken-s--- administrators 86ed it, however. Preemptively. Not because anybody complained about the title line, but because they feared that someone might.

It's truly late in the day.

Here's another person who embodies a bundle of our culture's ills

Jamie Oliver, the Naked Chef. Effete food snob who gives his kids ridiculuous names. Stages a cartoonishly unfair demonstration of what finely textured beef additive is about, calls it "pink slime," and causes a panic in the food industry, with very real economic ramifications.

He's the slimebag in this situation.

Some people are walking embodiments of what plagues our culture

Such as Marion Barry. After all that "down with dope" grandstanding as mayor, he gets caught on tape smoking crack. Still gets elected to the DC city council. Now he's making racist comments about Asians owning small businesses in Ward 8.

Will the big-league race hustlers call him out? Hell no, they're too busy trying to make something racial out of the Trayvon Martin case.

It takes forever to decide if the Keystone XL pipeline can be built over the proposed land, but appparently squandering our tax dollars on phoney-baloney solar power only takes a day

It looks like the Soyndra loan was rushed, put in place before financial experts had an adequate chance to examine its structure.

Well, let's hope so

NBC apologizes for its deliberate attempt to incite race conflict in America.


I know, Barracuda guest-hosted Today this morning. Can we hope that these developments are signs of reawakened regard for decency on the part of a once-great broadcasting organization?


UPDATE: Media Research Center, which broke the story about NBC's utterly dishonest editing job, isn't buying the network's phony apology.

It's the blantant ignoring of Marbury v. Madison that gets Ruth's attention

Neo-neocon notes the exception taken by WaPo columnist Ruth Marcus, who is big-time inclined to support the MEC in any given situation, to his bringing up of the majority by which FHer-care was passed by Congress.

If they have any interest at all in going on record as having personal integrity, even the most hopeless FHers have to call 'em as they see 'em when there's no alternative but looking like a stooge.

From the overwrought faux formality of hats and canes to the animal abandon of skin ostentation, the message is "Check me out, world!"

Rob Long on the state of prom night and the deterioration of our culture.

He'll be giving it to us straight from now on

It's pretty clear to anyone that the Most Equal Comrade has turned up the stridency and combativeness - not to mention intellectual vulgarity and disingenuousness - in his recent pronouncements. There was the 'you're-on-your-own'-economics'doesn't-work speech at the University of Vermont. There was the implied threat to the Supreme Court over the FHer-care invidivual mandate, with its clear "Justice-Kennedy-will-you-really-be-able-to-sleep-at-night-if-you-take-away-the-coverage-of-the-newly-covered" message. Now, there's his speech at the Associated Press luncheon at which he calls Paul Ryan's budget "thinly veiled social Darwinism".

One thing to remember about the MEC, and we've noted it here at LITD before, is that he's not stupid. He's no genius, probably not even one of the twenty most intelligent presidents we've ever had, but he's not an idiot. His intellectually muddled assertions, such as that the Supreme Court deliberation over the individual mandate is about whether some particular type of American demographic does or does not get health care, or that we've been on the right track with stimulus spending, which was the implied message behind his "out-of-a-job?-you're-on-your-own-according-to-the-Republicans" utterance, are deliberate confusions of the issue.

He knows the individual mandate is unconstitutional. He knows government can't create jobs. He knows we're headed for national bankruptcy and economic collapse.

All this "shared responsibility" / "brother's keeper" / "common purpose" rhetoric is designed to make the individual American citizen devalue his own ability to choose his or her own course of action, to define his or her own vision of a well-lived life, to diminish his or her own sense of life's possibilities.

Leftism represents a stunted view of human development. It's based on resentment. The MEC certainly embodies this. His parents and mentors all inculcated in him the notion that what normal, freedom-cherishing people call achievement is an act of greed. He thinks that it is the supreme arrogance to suppose that you, as an individual, can envision a great contribution to human advancement - and expect to profit from it - and set about making that vision a reality.

He doesn't "sort of" embrace this. He's not a mildly annoying liberal. He's our worst nightmare. He believes this stuff as surely as you and I treasure basic liberty, common sense and invididual dignity.

He's not trying to sugar-coat anything anymore. He's not even waiting for reelection to let us know where he's really coming from.

The alternative to the MEC is still being hashed out, but we know what one of our two choices as a nation is.

If we're smart, we'll henceforth consider every syllable that comes out of his Marxist mouth a warning.

We're supposed to buy this from a source that wouldn't know conservatism if it bit them on the tail end

So the Los Angeles Times says that two Reagan administration judicial scholars hope the Supreme Court "comes to its senses" and ultimately gives a thumbs-up to FHer-care. Ony problem, as it turns out, is that the thinkers involved are not by any stretch pro-freedom righties. They went for the MEC in 2008, in fact.

I run into this from time to time in exchanges such as Facebook snits, when the other person involved will try to legitimize his collectivism with something along the lines of "I used to be a conservative, but the movement became so populated with cartoonish clowns and extremists (and here they mean Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh) that I moved away from that position." But when you do a little conversational probing, you find out they don't know a damn thing about Edmund Burke or Russell Kirk or Herbert Spencer or Whittaker Chambers.

Lame attempts to co-opt what we're about can be smelled a mile away.

"An existential threat"

That's how a former Marine strike planner characterizes what the MEC regime is to the survival of Israel in the wake of the leaked information about Azerbaijan granting Israel permission to use its airfields in an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.